ROME
ETERNAL CITY
FERDINAND ADDIS Head of Zeus, 632pp, £30, Oldie price £20.83 inc p&p
Ferdinand Addis first visited Rome as a teenager, then read Classics at Oxford. ‘He presents himself as just another tourist and his project as a labour of love and curiosity rather than scholarly expertise, let alone original research,’ wrote Emily Gowers in the Guardian. ‘But this is an energetic attempt to bring Rome’s history alive through grand narrative; the florid flights and snappy paragraphs are underpinned by serious reading.’ His ‘chosen formula is to serve up selected highlights, mostly the expected ones – Romulus and Remus, the Ides of March, the Borgias, the Sistine Chapel, Garibaldi and La Dolce Vita are all here – but to come at them from quirky angles… Addis casts a keen eye over not just the big figures of history but also its crowds, mess and detritus.’ For
‘He relishes the highs and lows of Rome’s past in his purplest passages’
example, he describes how the Grand Tourists of the 18th century were so fascinated by the great sewer known as the Cloaca Maxima, that they ‘went trooping by the dozen to see the hole, like so many tiny proctologists peering solemnly into the gaping dark... Thanks to his enthusiasm, Addis succeeds in keeping his reader afloat. He relishes the highs and lows of Rome’s past in his purplest passages while pricking the bubbles of other people’s poetic licence.’
Writing in the Times, Patrick Kidd noted that ‘Rome’s history is written in blood and Addis, who has a vivid, pacey writing style, spares not the squeamish as he describes three millennia of violence, from the first kings to Il Duce’. But he also ‘sings of the magnificence of Rome: the masters of the arts, propagandists from Virgil to Fellini, who burnished its reputation, and the extraordinary engineering feats in which swamps were drained to become public spaces and aqueducts were built to carry spring water over dozens of miles’.